Power outages cripple the communication capabilities of optical communication systems, such as Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH), passive optical network (PON), RF over Glass (RFoG), and dedicated fiber access architectures including Active Ethernet (AE). More specifically, power outage have a crippling effect on the communications of the optical units of these systems, such as optical network terminals (ONTs) and optical network units (ONUs). Accordingly, these units are often equipped with external rechargeable backup batteries that provide power in case of power failures. For example, when power fails at an end user's location, an ONT can still provide certain services such as telephony and WiFi using the stored energy of the backup battery.
Typically, a backup battery can provide sufficient power to an ONT for approximately four to eight hours. Afterwards, the ONT ceases to function. From a network operator's perspective, it is desirable to obtain information about the ONT's status prior to the power outage. Status information can be maintained in non-volatile memory on the ONT (e.g., flash Random Access Memory or “RAM”, solid state devices or “SSDs”) but it is not available until the power is restored because communications with the ONT cannot be established until then. This status information (e.g., network status, transient faults, power blackouts and brownouts, etc.) can be very useful to the network operator when quickly trying to diagnose a problem.